Bloomberg dismissed such worries. If you have a high approval rating, you’re not doing enough of the hard stuff. Or, as he would sometimes put it, if you’re not falling on your skis, you’re staying too long on the baby slopes. One day in the bull pen, he was urging his commissioners to think big thoughts, even if his approval rating tanked. “Okay, it’s time to be controversial,” he said loudly.
Across the room, the deep voice of Ed Skyler rang out, “We’re counting on you, Tom,” as Frieden and Bloomberg smiled in unison.31
* * *
In Bloomberg’s final years at city hall, Frieden left to be director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and Dr. Thomas Farley took his place. Farley, who had been an epidemic intelligence officer at the CDC and Frieden’s second-in-command in the city, worked hard to battle obesity, a worthy mission that nevertheless caused Bloomberg the most national grief about his health campaigns. In what became known as the Big Gulp issue, Farley wanted to limit the sales of soft drinks to sixteen ounces each. As Farley remembered, he told Bloomberg about the idea and said, “This will be controversial.” Bloomberg simply laughed and said, “Oh, you figured that out?”32, 33
Bloomberg and Farley failed to sell the idea that it was not really a ban on big soda. You could always buy two sixteen-ounce drinks, they said, probably for the same price as one thirty-two-ounce Big Gulp. The idea was that buying two drinks might make people think twice about buying that second vat of liquid sugar. But it quickly became a match of the titans—Mayor Bloomberg versus Coke, Pepsi, their political surrogates, and even the late-night comics.
The jumbo soft drink debate moved into national politics with former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin drinking what was supposed to be a bucket-size soft drink during a 2013 speech to cheering conservatives. “Oh, Bloomberg’s not around,” she cooed. “Our Big Gulp’s safe.”34
Mississippi35 and North Carolina quickly enacted “anti-Bloomberg” laws to ward off limits on food, drink, or diet. North Carolina’s law was especially sweeping. It was called the Commonsense Consumption Act,36 and it prohibited local governments (i.e., cities) from limiting the size of soft drinks for sale. It also made certain that food manufacturers, advertisers, sellers—the whole make-’em-fat industry—could not be sued for someone’s obesity and the costly health problems that went along with it.
After Mississippi had passed its version, Bloomberg scoffed, “You gotta love it. In the state with the highest rate of obesity, they pass a law that says you can’t do anything about it.” At the time, 34.9 percent of adults in Mississippi were overweight or obese, compared to 24.5 percent in New York State.37
The soft drink industry’s billboards showed people who looked like they could run a marathon while protesting that Bloomberg’s bureaucrats might be keeping them from a big 513-calorie38 drink. They hammered their opposition on the sides of trucks delivering drinks and even on banners attached to airplanes over Coney Island.39 At one point, executives from Coca-Cola offered an alternative plan that would involve more diet sodas and smaller sizes, but no shift on the big ones. When Bloomberg sat down with the executives and listened to their pitch, it was the only time Dr. Farley could recall seeing the mayor uncomfortable.40 This was the businessman Bloomberg warring with Bloomberg, the public health advocate.
In New York, the limits on big sodas won in city hall but lost in the courts. The high-priced lawyers from the soft drink industry argued that Bloomberg’s Department of Health had exceeded its authority and strayed into lawmaking. The 2014 majority ruling of 4–2 by the New York State Court of Appeals was written by a judge appointed by Republican governor George Pataki, and it was a major loss for the city’s health department and Bloomberg’s health activists. The dissent written by another Pataki appointee, Judge Susan P. Read, was just as passionate. She wrote, “The majority misapprehends, mischaracterizes and thereby curtails the powers of the New York City Board of Health to address the public health threats of the 21st century.”41 She spoke to a new form of public health that had moved from only fighting diseases like typhoid and TB to battling the way human choices contributed to obesity, heart disease, and cancer.42
After the public fuss subsided, Bloomberg would tell people that he had actually won the soda war. All that bad publicity for him was also bad publicity for Coke and Pepsi. The news media might call him the Nanny Mayor, but some analysts on television had also displayed a pile of nine sugar cubes like that found in a seven-ounce cup of soda and a giant pyramid of eighty-seven sugar cubes in a sixty-four-ounce drink of soda (which supposedly was sold to quench the thirst of an entire family). Soon the sales of soda, and even diet soda, were declining steadily and water seemed to be the favorite drink of weight-conscious Americans.43 And in 2014 Gallup found that more than 60 percent of Americans now said they were avoiding soda in their diets.44, 45
* * *
In the final Bloomberg years as mayor, Farley worked hard to help the mayor take Frieden’s missions to the next level. City parks and beaches became smoke-free, and shortly before he left office, Bloomberg signed a law raising the age for anyone to buy cigarettes from eighteen to twenty-one.46 Farley introduced letter grades for restaurants, which some restaurateurs groused about as ridiculous. Tomatoes, for example, had to be cold—a terrible idea, salad lovers would protest—and fines were sometimes exorbitant—one private school got a $900 ticket for having fruit flies.47 Soon most restaurants got A’s, however, either by conforming to more rigorous rules against vermin or unwashed vegetables or by appealing to city officials about overzealous ticketing. Bloomberg declared success when salmonella infections in the city dropped 14 percent after the first year of giving out A, B, Cs and listing the unappetizing reasons for those grades publicly on the health department’s website.
At one point Farley went too far even for the mayor when he appeared to be angling for curtailing pub hours like in the old days in Britain. That didn’t fly. Instead, Farley came up with the “Two Drinks Ago” campaign to fight binge drinking. “Alcohol takes a devastating toll on our health and well being,” Farley’s statement began. “New Yorkers are surrounded by ads selling alcohol, and the messages are enticing. Beer, wine and liquor may look like passports to sophistication and romance. But even two extra drinks can turn a good time into a disaster . . .”48
The anti-drinking ads on the subway showed a man with a big gash on his forehead and a woman slumped dangerously on what looked like subway steps. “Two Drinks Ago you could still get yourself home,” the ad warned. The mayor, who enjoyed wine at his Italian restaurant, or the politicos, who relished a few beers at the corner pub, worried that this taking on alcohol was not in their best interest, politically or personally.
Even more controversial was an effort encouraged by both Drs. Frieden and Farley to warn Hasidic families about a medieval circumcision ritual. Bloomberg’s health commission began requiring parents to consent before baby boys were circumcised during a ritual called metzitzah b’peh. The mohel, the person who performs the rite, uses his mouth to suck blood away from the child’s penis after the foreskin is cut away. Bloomberg, the secular Jewish mayor, warned that children had died or gone blind because of this unsanitary procedure.
Members of the huge Hasidic community in Brooklyn were outraged. But Bloomberg again seemed to thrive on the controversy.
“I think it’s fair to say that nobody else would take that on. I mean, come on!” he told one journalist. “Who wants to have 10,000 guys in black hats outside your office, screaming?”
Bloomberg added, “But there is a reasonable chance that this is dangerous to kids’ health. There have been some kids who we believe die or have brain damage from the practice.”49
In the Jewish community, many heard only one thing—the ten thousand guys in black hats. “For the mayor to identify an entire religious group by the clothes they proudly wear is the basest of insults,” said one Orthodox Jewish official, City Councilman David Greenfie
ld. “It is even more offensive coming from a secular Jewish mayor.”50
* * *
In his twelve years, Bloomberg easily earned the title as New York’s premier public health mayor. The percentage of adults who smoked in the city went down by an astonishing 35 percent while he was mayor.51 The rates ticked up slightly when women began smoking more—television’s Sex and the City effect, as health officials like Dr. Frieden called it. Then too many men resumed the habit for the Mad Men effect. Still, rates continued to go down in the next few years as smokers were banished to the sidewalks, where they often looked embarrassed that they were unable to resist their dangerous habit even as users moved to electronic cigarettes. Sophisticated and romantic, it was not.
The campaign against Coke and Pepsi may have lost in the courts, but the ads on the subway (which Bloomberg’s successor kept on the Health Department website) were intentionally repulsive. One famously showed nauseating blobs of fat pouring out of a soda bottle. People suffering through their daily commute often turned away, but the image was hard to forget.
Bloomberg also worked to make the city’s air and water cleaner—his administration began phasing out the dirtiest heating oils (number 4 and 6 grades),52 and the black smoke from buildings began to thin out, then virtually disappear. Bloomberg, the ex-engineer, got the city to commit $4.7 billion to complete a key part of a new water tunnel that was authorized nearly sixty years earlier to supplement Manhattan’s aging underground network. “It’s not sexy,” the mayor admitted when he turned the ceremonial wheel to open the massive water pipes in 2013. “And nobody says thank you.”53
Altogether there were more than one hundred health initiatives in the Bloomberg era—from more bike lanes and smoke-free zones and no trans fats and dozens of Green Carts bringing fresh produce to communities where it was hard to find even a fresh apple. Scientific American magazine asked whether all the Bloomberg programs made New Yorkers healthier. Their conclusion, “Yes, but it’s complicated.”54 For all the good in Bloomberg’s legacy, the rates of obesity and diabetes overall got worse during his twelve years in office. Still, that left such a wide array of improvements that even Bloomberg’s highly critical successor, Bill de Blasio, was forced to mumble a little praise occasionally for the Bloomberg health agenda.
When the city’s life expectancy increased three years, compared to a national average of 1.7 years, Bloomberg boasted, “If you want to live longer and healthier than the average American, then come to New York City.”55 More pointedly, as he promised New Yorkers complaining about his various restrictions on some of their favorite vices, “Just before you die, remember you got three extra years.”
13
THE GEEK SQUAD
“This isn’t just some stuff. This is the stuff that makes a difference, day in and day out.”
—Bloomberg, on plans to make New York a digital city, 2011
One bright October morning in 2005, the city’s telephone operators suddenly began receiving bizarre calls to Mayor Bloomberg’s 311 citizens’ complaint line. Manhattan residents reported that the air outside didn’t smell right. Instead of the normal odors of the big city, their neighborhoods smelled sweet, kind of like maple syrup. Veterans of 9/11 worried—weren’t there some poison gases that smell like ripened fruit? Could this be some devious terrorist’s cover for a deadly cloud? When it happened again a few days later, city officials assured the public that the odor was not dangerous. One sniffer scoffed that this had been a case of crazy Manhattan overreacting to the “Aunt Jemima wing of al Qaeda.”1
Still, city officials wanted to know where the smell came from, just in case it was a prelude to something more dangerous. The city’s experts on dangerous gas plumes (or radioactivity) helped out, as they mapped the locations of the 311 callers. They charted the winds for those days. They cross-checked and analyzed the data. And finally, the city confirmed what many New Yorkers had suspected all along—the smell was coming from New Jersey. The culprit was a “flavor enhancement” used by a “natural flavor” factory to turn a form of fenugreek into mock maple syrup. The odor had wafted innocently over the Hudson River to Manhattan.2
Bloomberg loved it. He loved the way his 311 line and the city’s data nerds could figure out what was going on. “Given the evidence, I think it’s safe to say that the Great Maple Syrup Mystery has finally been solved,” he crowed, offering praise for his “smelling sleuths.”
In far more important ways than tracking aromas from New Jersey, Mike Bloomberg would use the skills that made him a billionaire to help operate the big city. He wanted to be the data mayor. He wanted New York City to work as well as one of his machines. Outside city hall, this meant encouraging the new technology business to create “Silicon Alley,” as DoubleClick, a company later bought by Google, tried to rename the Flatiron area of Manhattan. Soon, a cluster of tech start-ups would set up shop in the old manufacturing section of Brooklyn, and eventually Bloomberg would create a new graduate school, Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, to provide technological expertise for commercial, government, or nonprofit sectors in the city. But it was inside city hall where Bloomberg first began to use data to change the culture of his government.
If you came to him with a proposal, he wanted the numbers. He pounced on any weak details. He spotted holes in the worksheets. He redrew graphs—a graph should tell a story, he would say. He wanted new ideas and reforms to start immediately without baking in years of planning. And he wanted long-range, data-rich proposals for keeping the city on top in the future.
For the nation’s largest city with its vast retro infrastructure, this was a massive undertaking, and Bloomberg and his army would succeed in important ways and bog down in others. Creating the 311 phone system was a triumph, yet he would struggle with modernizing the 911 telephone system that had become a giant tangle of warring interests among emergency responders, especially police and firefighters. (What other New York politician would dare even try to make police and firefighters work better together, even for emergencies?) He would inherit and fail for years to recognize a major data scandal involving contractors building a new digital payroll system called CityTime for the entire city workforce. But overall, his aim was to make New York the “top-ranked digital city,” and it would take years and billions of taxpayer dollars for Bloomberg and his people to drag much of the city government’s technology into the twenty-first century.
When Bloomberg moved into city hall, aides groused that some computers could have been on display in the Smithsonian. Department systems could not talk to one another or get their latest information fast enough to an impatient public. A few experts warned the new mayor about the city’s technical gaps. Bruce Bernstein, then president of the New York Software Industry Association, a trade group supporting information technologies, described the nest of networks as “one of the most complex information systems in the world.” Also one of the oldest for an advanced city’s not-so-advanced government.3
Pre-Bloomberg, there had been a few attempts to modernize the technology. The city, like most of the rest of the computerized world, nervously tried to prepare for the year 2000 when computers failed to go berserk as predicted in the Y2K frenzy. But as Bloomberg was dutifully touring agencies early in his first term, he was shocked to find that many in the outer boroughs didn’t have email. That was also true, he soon learned, even for some in city hall.4 And some systems were working so erratically that many of Bloomberg’s new hires began using their own laptops to do their jobs. (Bloomberg, of course, had his own terminals set up at his central bull pen desk. And he kept his private email from his perch at Bloomberg LP throughout his twelve years as a public official.)
The Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which oversaw much of the city’s computer world, barely functioned by Bloomberg standards. Insiders called it DoITT (Do-it), which some Bloomberg staffers quickly renamed “Don’t do it.” Bloomberg energized a dispirited DoITT; he became the “hammer,” as one insi
der recalled,5 and DoITT was no longer a sleepy outpost in the vast city bureaucracy. Gino Menchini, who was commissioner for DoITT during Bloomberg’s first term, recalled how his agency went from a backwater, scrambling for funds, to a prime mission. “My biggest challenge was not selling technology but keeping up with Mike’s expectations,” Menchini said. “He represented a game changer in that respect.”6
* * *
Bloomberg had 311 near the top of his to-do list, and he repeatedly promised New Yorkers that they would have two numbers to reach their government—911 for emergencies and 311 for everything else.7 Idea maven Ester Fuchs of Columbia University remembered early in his first campaign when Bloomberg asked how a New Yorker would call or email or get in touch with their city. How did they know where to complain if the garbage wasn’t picked up or the noise level had become unbearable? An aide handed Bloomberg a regular telephone book with a government section that included the city. You had to call one of those numbers and hope you would not be transferred, “ping-ponged” back and forth, or put on hold. Forever. “He was completely horrified,” Fuchs recalled.8
The city still had at least forty separate call centers, an assortment of hotlines and customer help numbers, not to mention those eleven pages dedicated to the city government in the public phone book. Savvy New Yorkers forked over $20 for a small, green directory that had numbers and often names of every deputy and sub-deputy. The ordinary citizen was stuck waiting on hold.
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 16
